Two families whose historic involvement in the ocean have paralleled one another for three generations come together to save what they both love
A sliver of Santa Monica Bay off Point Vicente in Palos Verdes was ruled off limits to fishers last month. The five-square mile closure by State Fish and Game followed two years of acrimonious debate.
Characteristically of political compromises, the small Marine Protected Area (MPA) made no one happy. Commercial and sport fishers point to last year’s return of blue whales as evidence that the bay is healthy and doesn’t need further protection. Gillnetters and seiners that once strip mined the bay were banned in the 1980s.
Preservationists wanted the no fishing zone to wrap north along the peninsula’s fertile kelp beds to the nutrient rich upwelling of the 400-meter deep Redondo Canyon, an 18 square mile area of the bay’s richest fishing grounds.
Jean-Michel Cousteau, when asked his view of the controversy, responded how 350.org’s Bill McKibben might respond if asked about global warming. With insuppressible exasperation.
“You say the blue whales showed up? You mean, showed up, again. They were here before we were on the planet. Before we started screwing up their world. And now, we act surprised that they are here,” he said.
Cousteau was interviewed at his Ocean Futures Society headquarters, a modest pueblo style building in Santa Barbara. The lobby pays homage to the Cousteau legacy with displays of dive gear and underwater cameras, including the aqualung and Nikonos camera that his father Jacques co-invented. The walls are covered with photos of the Cousteau expeditions that over the past six decades have brought the undersea world to ever greater public consciousness. A life-size photo shows his assistant biologist Holly Lohuis diving off of Hermosa Beach’s sister city Loreto in the Sea of Cortez, surrounded by giant Humboldt squid. A cable is attached to her dive tank as a precaution against the squid dragging her to the bottom.
Behind the Ocean Futures offices is a warehouse with racks of wetsuits, shelves of Pelican camera cases, a workshop, a dive boat and a compressor capable of filling SCUBA tanks with gas mixtures for every foreseeable dive depth and duration.
The gear is arranged to allow Cousteau and his crew of divers, biologists and filmmakers to depart to anywhere in the world within a two hours’ notice.
Cousteau is not as tall as his presence suggests. But otherwise, the white bearded mariner is little different in person from the concerned father-figure familiar to any PBS viewer.
Only, in person, the soothing, on camera voice can take on an edge of impatience. He is 73 like his beloved ocean is also short on time.
Schools of large ocean fish, including tuna, swordfish, halibut and cod, have been depleted by 90 percent since the start of industrial fishing 100 years ago, according to a 1993 Nature report. Without protection, major fish stocks will have collapsed by 2048, the journal asserts.
But the trend can be reversed, which helps explain Cousteau’s exasperation. A study of 124 marine reserves by the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coast Oceans (PISCO) found that the number of fish in the reserves increased 446 percent, plants and animals increased 166 percent, body size increased 28 percent and species diversity increased 21 percent.
Ironically, the impact of marine reserves may be one of the most important discoveries of the U.S.space program, Cousteau pointed out.
“Cape Canaveral is where it all started. After fishing was banned under the take-off path, fishing in the bordering waters exploded,” he said.
“It’s not just the oceans that are threatened,” Cousteau stressed. “People need to keep in mind, whether they live along the coast or inland, we have just one water system.”
